


Drive-In Theater

by AllGrey



Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout 4
Genre: Angst, Complicated questions of identity, Dissociation, F/M, If we weren't gonna get Kellogg!Nick then I was gonna give myself Kellogg someone dammit, Pre-Romance, Recreational Drug Use, and a pinch of fluff, implied sex, little time jumping at the beginning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-16
Updated: 2016-11-16
Packaged: 2018-08-31 08:00:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,686
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8570695
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AllGrey/pseuds/AllGrey
Summary: Cassia thinks back to when Hancock was following her, but barely knew her.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This sat in my drafts untouched for five months. I'm a mess. Please take it from me.

****

There’s not much here left of who she was before 

Just an old friend

And of course Codsworth helps, as much as he can.

But she closes her eyes and sees her husband

Then a gunshot

And her boy

Then an old man.

And it’s all tangled up in her head.

Sometimes Kellogg pulls the trigger on her husband and sometimes she does.

Sometimes she kills the man calling himself her son and Father

\- in the same breath, how can he- 

sometimes Kellogg hits the detonator.

Sometimes she doesn’t lose a husband and a son in fire and ice,

Sometimes she loses a daughter and wife in blood and steel.

When Valentine glitches into him, at first

she runs.

Eventually she understands, is the same, even.

But at first-

It’s how she really meets him.

She makes a mistake helping Bobbi

But before she knows it, the woman is dead

And she stands in front of a scarred, irradiated man in colonial get-up.

Of course he had killed someone for her earlier, but she couldn’t see around her grief.

Now she does, and he is...different.

She likes it.

He gets her high for the first time in her life,

during a rad storm at Starlight Drive-In.

(Conveniently the same place she had sex the first time,

It’s just a place for firsts)

She had told him before that she was going after the Institute, but she hadn’t told him about  _ them _ .

But in the back of the Drive-In…

She hadn’t seen one of these before. A storm where the radiation her world spewed is tossed around with lightning. She hadn’t known what was happening, not really, not until her geiger counter started up as the wind came harder.

“More fuckin’ radiation?” She looked around for a barrel, or unclean water. Something to avoid.

“That’s the Wasteland for ya, darlin’.” Hancock, scanned the parking lot before making his way towards the screen.

“Where’s it coming from?” She muttered, poking at what must have been her broken Pip-boy.

“Doll? What’re you doing?” Hancock was already inside the little room they had glanced over earlier.

“Trying to figure out what’s wrong with this-” And that’s when she heard the thunder crack. She jumped at first, twirling around to see giant green clouds rolling toward her.

“What the fuck? What’s happening?” She nearly jumped again when Hancock’s hand came down on her shoulder.

“It’s a rad storm! Let’s get inside before you start lookin’ like me!” His voice rose as the storm got louder.

Radiation. In a storm. This apocalypse had everything she never wanted. What will they think of next? (A lot worse, she knows now.)

She followed Hancock closely while they escaped the green mess. He let her in first, and she stopped halfway through the room (although there wasn’t that much of it).

It was….different, when she was here last. Of course, that was 218 years ago, so it was to be expected. But really. Very different.

It was a storage room then, used to hold all the old tapes and cleaning supplies. No one really came back to it any time she had gone to the movies, so of course her and Brian Kershire had come back here to fool around.

Now… Well, someone in the last 2 centuries had decided to make it a home. There was a radio, a fridge in the corner, a couch they had probably slept on, and…..a crib.

“Damn, I guess you really are from a Vault, huh?” Hancock said as he closed the door.

Her eyes snapped from the crib to focus on his face. Easier than thinking of what she’d been avoiding for about two weeks now. “Uh...yeah. Do those happen...often?”

“Ehh...depends on the year, I guess.” He took a look around the room and moved around her to the couch.

“Wait. You’ve never sat through one of these before.” The look on his face was uncharacteristically serious.

“Right…?”

It was like a switch had flipped. Care-free had gone directly to  _ caring _ . Hancock grabbed her by the shoulders and steered her to the couch. “Sit. And give me your bag.”

Confused, she handed it to him.

“Here.” He pulled out three Rad-X and a bottle of clean water.

“I’m saving those for the Glowing Sea.” She protested.

“We can find more later, sister. You’ll need it.” He was still so serious.

Her brow furrowed (and wow were those wrinkles gonna be deep one day soon) but she took the pills. While she did, Hancock resumed digging through her bag until he brought out a blanket.

“This’ll make you feel more comfortable.” He dropped it around her shoulders.

“I’m fine. Perfectly comfortable.” She lied, with only one glance at the crib, that was entirely subtle, thank you.

It wasn’t her fault that this place was apparently destined to make sure she had the most conflicting emotions possible.

…..

Okay she was the one who suggested the storage room to Brian for a rendezvous, sure. But she had absolutely no idea at 16 that she would be sitting in the same room 200 years later with a colonial zombie mayor and a crib that reminded her both of her missing infant son and her dead husband. Wrapped up in a blanket, in the middle of a storm made of radiation.

Because it would have been crazy to guess that when you were looking for places to have sex as a teenager. So leave her alone.

“Yeah, you look it.” Hancock said sarcastically, snapping her out of her considerations. “I have some stuff that can help you relax if you’d like.”

She blushed. “No, I’m fine, really. I’m not...I’ve never…”

“All the more reason to try it now. We’ll be stuck in here for a couple of hours, and I won’t let you over-do yourself.” He smiled. “I’m the mayor of Goodneighbor. I know chems.”

Her eyes flicked over to the crib again. “...I’ll consider it.”

“Alright.” And he unceremoniously flopped to the ground and began eating from a bag of chips.

An hour in, she had played all of Atomic Command that she could stomach with all the radiation outside (and Jesus that storm was loud) and checked her radio a good seven times only to find that, yes, you  _ still _ can’t get a signal through a radiation storm. Hancock had abandoned his chips for an issue of Grognak the Barbarian. And her eyes kept straying to the crib.

She fiddled with dials on her Pip-boy meaninglessly for a few moments before she gave in. “Hancock?”

He didn’t look up from his comic when he answered, “Yeah, Cassie?” 

“I...uh...do you have anything, um, that’ll...make me..” She was the largest nerd on the planet. Really. Stuttering about drugs even after the world ended. Ridiculous.

“Well, whatever you’re thinking about, I got it.” He sat up from his spread-eagled position to reach for his bag. “Happy, sad, pumped, smart, stupid, angry, relaxed-”

“Relaxed.” She cut him off, and her skin darkened as she blushed.

“A-okay, sister, here ya go.” And he passed her an….inhaler?

“Wha...What is this?” She twirled it around but didn’t see any medical information. Which was ridiculous to expect. Really Cassia, you thought two centuries in on an apocalypse someone would sit down and mark their  _ drugs _ for health facts? People didn’t do that with Ecstasy back in her day.

And that sounded too much like an old woman to continue that train of thought, so she cut it off in time to hear Hancock’s explanation.

“Jet? Ya had to have heard about it. Take a puff and relax. I’ll do some mentats.” He pulled out his pills and dropped on the couch next to her.

“Um...alright. Are you sure both of us should be….?” She coughed a little. Her throat was dry.

“If anything goes wrong, I’ll be able to think faster.” Then he winked and popped one in his mouth.

She let out a breath and returned to the Jet. Did she want to…? And wow she was so nervous, if it would make her relax she needed to do it now.

So she brought the inhaler to her lips, squeezed, and breathed in.

Everything shifted. The room slowed and focused in and the sound from the storm became muted. Not just muted, distorted and….silly?

Yeah, silly. Just like Hancock, right now. He was staring at her all intently and his face was….shifty. It made her want to giggle. And why did she hold in that all the time? That was silly too.

So she giggled. Like a schoolgirl. Which was silly. So she giggled some more. And then Hancock’s eyes slowly opened wider. Then wider, and  _ wider _ . And now she was full-out laughing, feeling bubbly and warm in a way that she hadn’t since before the bombs.

And that thought didn’t even make her that sad.

She just looked at Hancock and laughed until the first of the Jet pulled away.

It left her feeling….not that bad actually. Or was that the laughing? Who really cared? She certainly didn’t. She felt okay, for the first time in a while. That time it hurt a little, but more of a distant pang than a knife-in-her-soul kind of ache. When she remembered breath again, which certainly seemed like a long time, but really couldn’t have been, she turned to look at Hancock.

He was sitting there with the biggest, most shocked grin she has ever seen. Especially when it looked like it should hurt on his face. And her brain moved so slowly she thought his lips moved before he even spoke, but eventually she caught up.

“You’re beautiful.”

And she froze, the tilting of the room froze, hell, the sound of the storm disappeared entirely as her slowed brain attempted to formulate a response to that.

To tell him about Nathan, about her son, about 200 years and a bomb, about what’s really happened with the Institute. 

And while she sat there mired, he moved quickly. The Mentats had him firing on all cylinders. He saw her sitting frozen and backpedaled. “I’m sorry, I’ve never seen you laugh, you look really nice like that you know? And there’s not supposed to be any pressure. You just look better happy, even though you’re usually sad and-”

He jerked back and gasped. “Shit! You’ve been looking at the crib this whole time. It’s a kid, isn’t it? What happened?”

It really was a good idea to have one think fast while the other slowed down, because there was absolutely no way she could have lead him past beautiful. She already felt another wave of silly come crashing over, and her desire to fight it was…..pathetically small. So she opened her mouth to say something along the lines of ‘my whole life was ruined’ when Hancock was struck by more brilliance.

“The goddamn Institute! They have your baby! That is so fucked up. We are gonna kill every one of the bastards-” And before she could even nod, he jumped up and was pacing the area between her and the fridge. Which was tiny, but he somehow managed it.

“How did they get at you from the Vault? Is that why you left? Do they prey on Vaults more? Oh, they’d have to, you guys are weaker, if they come after us, they’d come after you too.” And while he wasn’t wrong, he wasn’t  _ technically  _ right either and she really needed to tell him. She should have already told him. How was she supposed to get him to stop talking when she couldn’t even get off the floor?

The floor? How did she even get -

“Maybe it’d be better to move ‘em to the surface, make it more safe. Set up a section in Goodneighbor for ‘em, slowly integrate them into-”

And  _ that _ was much too far ahead of her so when he came close enough, she reached out and smacked him on the knee. It shut him up quick enough.

“Oh! You need to talk about it, right?” Hancock smiled, in what she had come to know as a comforting manner. “Well, I’m here for ya.” He said as he lowered himself to the ground across from her.

She stared at him for a second. Even high, it just kept hurting and oh, she wanted it to stop. She wanted Shaun in her arms and Nate by her side. But….she didn’t have to do this alone. Nick had said that, before she ran. She didn’t have to be alone.

“I-” her voice cracked right away, and she realized she was crying. Hancock didn’t say anything, which was a surprise, he just waited. “I’m not from a Vault.”

His confusion was immediate “What?”

“I’m from before. Before Vaults.”

“...What?” Either the Mentats had worn off or it was just that unbelievable.

She sighed. She had to explain this, and as best as she could. Which, considering her mental state even  _ before _ she had gotten high, wasn’t going to be easy. She didn’t know where to start, really. Just saying before wasn’t good enough. She had to say what had been done to her family in total. 

_ Vault-Tec _ , she thought suddenly.

“The battles had just died down. Before the bombs fell. We were just...waiting. China and America, glaring at each other, waiting for the next move, the next twitch. And everybody at home was so tense. Ready for anything, we thought.” She snorted. Her head felt clearer now, but was it only going to be for a minute again? Or was it what she was talking about that sobered her up?

Hancock’s eyes widened in understanding, and his mouth opened before snapping shut. He was going to let her finish.

“Vault-Tec came up. Said they had the answer, that if nuclear armageddon came, we could go and hide, so long as we passed the screening. It made….sense, we thought. Nate and I.” Her throat was clogged up, but she swallowed through it. “Just in case, just a few dollars a month….not a big deal, really. And then one day, Codsworth turned on the TV and...New York was hit. We just grabbed Shaun and ran. We were almost too late.” She laughed bitterly.

“We were getting in just when the bomb fell. Sometimes I think it might’ve been easier if….” She trailed off. As much as she hated now, did she want to die? As impossible as this seems, she can handle it, right? “When we got in, they, they said they had these things. Decontamination, or whatever. I had the one right across from Nate and the baby.”

Hancock had a look on his face that seemed almost too close to pity, but honestly, she couldn’t blame him. She almost pitied herself.

“They froze us. And...and I woke up ten years ago. For just a minute. And that’s when the fucking Institute came. They opened up Nate’s pod, and he was so…” Nate had clung to their son, and had died trying to defend him. There was no way to get to him, to protect him. The lump in her throat had doubled in size and there was no way to hold it in anymore. She decided to let her tears fall, and was a bit surprised when a sob chased them.

She was moderately less surprised when Hancock’s arms closed around her.

“They took Shaun! And he wouldn’t let them, fought all he could, and- and-” She couldn’t say any more, could only sob and sniffle into Hancock’s coat.

She doesn’t know how long it is before she stopped sobbing enough to hear him making soothing sounds at her. Enough to feel him stroking her hair. And to feel exhaustion finally pull at her.

“I’m sorry.” she got out between sniffs.

“We’re gonna make every last one of those Institute bastards sorry. We’re gonna get your son back and burn that place to the fucking ground.” And he sounded so angry, so determined….

She could almost believe it.

****  
  



End file.
